[governance] Inputs for synthesis paper

Tue Sep 9 16:07:21 EDT 2008

Hello Parminder,

If the Rights based approach has to be the theme, so be it. But I don't like
Parminder's draft as a starting point. I like Barlow's draft instead.

May be we can go over this, modify the tone to suit a diplomatic forum, but
retaining the essence of this Declaration?
*
*

*A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace *

*by John Perry Barlow <barlow at eff.org> *

*Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I
come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask
you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather.*

*We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral
right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true
reason to fear.*

*Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You
have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not
know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your
borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself
through our collective actions.*

*You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you
create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our
ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order
than could be obtained by any of your impositions.*

*You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this
claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't
exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will
identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social
Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our
world, not yours. Our world is different.*

*Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself,
arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a
world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.*

*We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice
accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.*

*We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her
beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence
or conformity.*

*Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and
context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no
matter here.*

*Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by
physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest,
and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be
distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our
constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope
we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we
cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.*

*In the United States, you have .. created a law, the Telecommunications
Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of
Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These
dreams must now be born anew in us.*

*You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world
where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your
bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to
confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of
humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole,
the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from
the air upon which wings beat.*

*In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States,
you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at
the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small
time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.*

*Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate
themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own
speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be
another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world,
whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed
infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires
your factories to accomplish.*

*These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same
position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had
to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our
virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to
your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so
that no one can arrest our thoughts. *

*We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more
humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.*

*Davos, Switzerland *

*February 8, 1996 *

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:34 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy <
isolatedn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Civil Society,
>
> Have you noticed this?
>
> *Tunis Agenda says in 35, the management of the Internet ... should
> involve all stakeholders, but assigns the importance of stakeholders to the
> convenience of governments:
> *
>
>    1.
>
>    *Policy authority ... is the sovereign right of States. They have
>    rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public
>    policy issues. *
>    2.
>
>    *The private sector ...  should continue to have, an important role ...
>    *
>    3.
>
>    *Civil society has also played an important role on Internet matters,
>    especially at community level, and should continue to play such a role.
>    *
>    4.
>
>    *(role for intergovernmental organizations)*
>    5.
>
>    *(role for international organizations)*
>
> If someone has to guarantee / arbitrate / enforce rights and law
> enforcement happens to be the "sovereign right of States"
>
> Sivasubramanian Muthusamy.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy <
> isolatedn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello Norbert Klein and All,
>>
>> This is a case in point. Within the existing legal structure, a
>> "collective" has opted for legal action. Good.
>>
>> But on the Internet, WITHOUT the legal framework, with no declared list of
>> rights,  flash this news in a few blog posts, post it in a few mailing
>> lists, pick up a banner here and there and you will find whole communities
>> from around the world plunging into affirmative action. May be even the
>> Government of Japan would pay swifter attention, sooner than it takes the
>> legal process to send a directive to set right the disparity
>>
>> That is the beauty of the Internet Model. We don't have to declare rights
>> to open a door for the proponents of greater control to volunteer to
>> concede/guarantee/arbitrate/enforce such rights that the Civil Society
>> declares.
>>
>> Tell me who is going to concede/guarantee/arbitrate/enforce Rights before
>> you begin discussing rights.
>>
>> Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
>> India
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Norbert Klein <nhklein at gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Let me also come in here. I am not sure if it is acceptable how I try to
>>> enter
>>> into this debate: I think it is not clear what the purpose of the draft
>>> is –
>>> at least it is not clear to me. Of course, in terms of intended
>>> procedures, I
>>> know. But...
>>>
>>> We seem to be caught in a philosophical debate – about individual or
>>> collective rights.
>>>
>>> A few days ago I read in a Japanese mailing list that people in the three
>>> very
>>> different communes of Ayabe, Shoubara, and Yukichou, in different regions
>>> of
>>> Japan, have organized and try to start legal action because of the poor
>>> Internet connection they have: while a lot of tasks of public
>>> administration
>>> are offred by the authorities online (often requiring broadband access to
>>> handle huge documents) –  they are disadvantaged. Others are disadvanaged
>>> because educational programs offered to the public cannot be accessed
>>> reasonably (again: broaband access required) and as a result the people
>>> are
>>> educatinally deprived, compared to the majority of the citizens in the
>>> country etc.
>>>
>>> I do not have many more details – but I imagine that the people who feel
>>> excluded from what is offered to the society in general do not much argue
>>> if
>>> they claim individual or collective rights – they are just motivated to
>>> get
>>> over their deprivation, which many individuals felt, some individuals
>>> articulated, and finally a "collective" is trying to get their situation
>>> brought up to the general standard in their society, by legal action.
>>>
>>> The debate whether claims are always made in terms of "my individual
>>> right"
>>> even when they are made by a group of individuals who may or may not
>>> consider
>>> this as a group right, has no commonly shared answer – neither throughout
>>> history, nor in all possible localities.
>>>
>>> Do we have to get it philosophically clear, or do we want to point
>>> towards
>>> some directions which might be solved by some joint legal activities
>>> (different in diffeent situaios)? If we want to work towards both anyway
>>> –
>>> might it then be possible to avoid the unsolved philosophical basis?
>>>
>>>
>>> Norbert Klein
>>> Open Institute/Cambodia
>>> --
>>> If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia,
>>> please visit us regularly - you can find something new every day:
>>>
>>> http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com (English)
>>> http://kanhchoksangkum.wordpress.com (Khmer)
>>> ____________________________________________________________
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy
>>
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy
>

-- 
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sivasubramanianmuthusamy
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